my husband and i have three feline companions at home, and we just discovered last night that we also have some wild mousey companions that have moved in. my cat, tobey, doesn't care at all about the mice and ignores them, but the other two are ALL ABOUT hunting and killing the mice. as soon as we discovered that we had mice, hubby and i went to our local hardware shop to look for a humane catch-and-release trap. they didn't have anything, really, and the guys working at the hardware shop basically told me i was crazy for not wanting to kill the mice straight away. i did not say that i was vegan (and thus playing into the "vegans are crazy extremist weirdos" stereotype that some people have) but i said i will not kill the mice, we just want them out of the house. we ended up buying some sonic plug-in rodent repellers that apparently emit a high-frequency noise only heard by rodents, hoping that will get them to scram. well, three of the mice were killed last evening by the cats. plus, we live in new hampshire, and it's cold and snowy here, so of course they want to be inside our warm house.

anyway. i just could not psychologically handle the murder happening in the living room last night, so i shut myself up in the bedroom with my cat. i had nightmares last night. this morning, thank goodness, there were no mousey corpses for me to discover, and i think there is one mouse out and about because the two hunter cats have been staring at some plastic crates for awhile like it's their job, so i have a feeling the mouse is there.

i guess i'm writing this to look for advice and support. advice to get the mice out of here, and support in regards to how horrible it is to have your beloved sweet furry kitties become killing machines. i know it's their instinct. i don't know if i'm being melodramatic? i can't tell. i just know that being vegan is like the core of who i am as a human being, and having my cats killing mice is so upsetting. we tried shutting the cats in rooms but they made some god-awful howling screams that until now i have never heard a cat make. jeepers creepers.

I'm sorry! that's super hard to deal with, I know. I've had to "clean up" dead rodents before and it sucks. Once, years ago when we let our cat outside, I found a dead bird under my bed. It's really rough. I know you can order humane traps online, so maybe you can do that with some rush shipping so that you get them soon and hopefully deter the cats.

_________________I am not a troll. I am TELLING YOU THE ******GOD'S TRUTH****** AND YOU JUST DON'T WANT THE HEAR IT DO YOU?

i feel your pain, joyfulvegan. there were mice in my last apartment, and my cat caught two or three over the span of about a week and a half and brought them into my bed in the middle of the night. they were small, and i think they might have been young; they must have been on the slow/uncoordinated side if she caught them, because she was 18 and not the stealthy huntress she used to be. it was a big emotional mess of being half-asleep and wanting to cry because the mouse was hurt and wanting to cry because there was mouse blood on my sheets and wanting to tell my cat how impressed i was that she had managed it and wanting to shake my cat for still needing to kill things when she was 112 years old. but in the end i just grabbed the mouse away from her before things got too messy and distracted her with some treats and re-made the bed. she was just doing what cats do.

regarding how to get rid of the mice . . . i have no idea. we accepted them as a fact of life in our house when i was growing up, and we always had cats, so i guess my parents figured things would balance out. i can't remember anyone trying to take any special measures.

_________________"rise from the ashes of douchebaggery like a fancy vegan phoenix" - amandabear"I'm pretty sure the moral of this story is: fork pants." - cq

Brr. I was once was sleeping in a guest room with an open window...and in the middle of the night, my friend's cat came in with her kill and proceeded to eat it on the floor next to the bed. The crunching sounds were awful.

Anyway, on the mice problem. Until you can get a humane trap, you can try a poor person's trap. First you have to find where they're coming in from. Then take a big brown paper grocery bag and fill it partway with loose balls of newspaper. You can bait the with peanut butter smeared on something or try something else (daiya cheese?) Then take the bag and tip it on its side and lay it flush along the wall near where the mice are coming in or where you know (by their droppings) where they are traveling. Mice like to stay next to walls; they do not generally travel out in the open. With any luck, the mice will walk along the wall and into the paper bag. Because of the balls of newspaper, you should be able to hear them rustling (or the cats will tell you that they are there).

Once they're in there, you tip the bag up and the mouse/mice are stuck on the bottom; they can't climb the edges of the paper bag. Now you can escort them outside, far away. Mice can travel quite aways to get back home, just like us!

Good luck. The paper bag trick sounds farfetched, but it actually worked for us! After you catch them, or even before -- you want to find where the're coming in at and block the gap. Foam insulation works really well. Our mice were coming in from under the stove, where the electric conduit came through from under the house.

Unfortunately, you really need to find out how they're getting into your house and block them which, depending on how your house was constructed and how large the population is, isn't always easy. They slip through very minute cracks. We've managed to block rats, squirrels, etc. but never mice.

If you catch and release, unless you take them miles away, they will come back or die in the attempt. And the native field mice we get in my house live in families/colonies, so I don't think they do well when separated. My husband used to trap and keep them in big cages until he thought he had them all. At least our cats tend to eat what they kill, which is gross, but since we don't feed them vegan anyway......

_________________Formerly Kaleicious. I still love kale, but no more than lots of other garden greens too! Orach is currently my favorite.

As gross as it is, I figure it is instinctual and part of the bargin of living with a cat. The thing that really stresses me out about my cat killing mice/rats is that I don't know where the rodent has been. Has it been exposed to poison? Was the mouse slow/dying because it is diseased or poisoned and that is why she was able to catch it? Big concern for me whenever this happens. I think it is in the interest of your cat's health to find how they are getting in and block it up. Also keeping everything clean helps.

The joys of cats! I live next to a farm and a river so there is always plenty of rodents around. I have a cat that really enjoys hunting and is impossible to keep him inside. Here, it is the done thing to leave a cat go outside. It is viewed as cruel by most people here to keep a cat indoors exclusively. When I got my cat I wanted him to be an indoor cat. A year later he darted out a window and now only comes home for feeding and only sticks around if the weather is severe. I've managed to rationalise it in my own head that the cat isn't vegan and is just following his natural instincts.

On the plus side, I haven't actually seen a rodent dead or alive in nearly 3 years. I used to see them regularly running up my back yard wall. I'm a big wuss so I like not seeing them at all.

We have the humane Tin Cat trap which works pretty well. But you HAVE to check it every day maybe more. Once 2 mice got in at once - there's more than enough room, and there was plenty of food in there - but they must have panicked and fought eachother to the death. :( Thankfully it was my husband checking the trap that day. There's also a way you can make a trap with a papertowel tube with peanut butter at one end balanced on a counter or something over a trash can so they fall in, but that may be an injurious drop?

We have the humane Tin Cat trap which works pretty well. But you HAVE to check it every day maybe more. Once 2 mice got in at once - there's more than enough room, and there was plenty of food in there - but they must have panicked and fought eachother to the death. :( Thankfully it was my husband checking the trap that day. There's also a way you can make a trap with a papertowel tube with peanut butter at one end balanced on a counter or something over a trash can so they fall in, but that may be an injurious drop?

I have a Tin Cat trap as well. Works great but definitely check it daily.

Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2011 11:51 amPosts: 8120Location: United States of New England

i dont have cats but we did have a mouse issue a couple years ago in the winter (we live in MA) the weird thing is that they were coming in through our finished basement in the room where the dogs hang out the most.completely useless dogs!!!! (i would think the smell of dogs would keep them away)

you need to find out where they are coming in and block that.there's several things you can do. apparently ammonia will block their scent trail so they cant find their way back in. so we have a shed underneath our deck that shares a wall with our house, there are windows INSIDE the shed in the wall that it shares with the house because the deck/shed was added a few years ago before we bought the house. im not sure if that is how they were getting in but i figured it was a good potential way to get it. in the winter every month or so i dump some ammonia over the threshhold of the door to the shed. urine is another thing that would work but i was never successful convincing my husband or the dogs to pee on the door (hehehe)

we think they were actually getting in in the front of hte house. we have a split level house so the basement windows are right at ground level. we had to rip a couple things apart and my husband bought some sort of foam that he sprayed in and it poofs up and hardens and it's harder for them to pass through. another trick is steel wool. they wont chew through that.

we havent had any problems since we did all that. unfortunately some mice did die in the melee :-( i think i cried through the whole ordeal but you really cant have mice running around your house.

ive heard from many people who have cats that mice is a temporary problem and once they realize you have cats they dont come back. i dont know if that is true since ive never had cats.

Although the sonic noise making things are only supposed to work against rodents, but many household pets are sensitive to them also, so I wouldn't recommend using them. Plus, I don't think they typically get good results.

Sometimes farm supply/tractor supply/feed stores have live traps. I even heard rumors of some walmarts carrying them.

Make sure they don't have access to any food in your home, by always sweeping up anything that's fallen on the floor straight away, not leaving out any leftovers on plates and keeping food in mouse-inaccessible places.

_________________Some woopiter from Jupiter then says, and I quote: "That can't be true because I read otherwise online. Just look on Youtube." - torque

For cats is just nature to chase mice. However, there are very few places that cats will be able to go to reach mice. We had an influx of mice last year. First we realised was their little droppings in our kitchen cupboard. Seems they were getting in behind the floor cupboards possibly from an outside air brick. We used good old fashioned mouse traps loaded with peanut butter. It worked and is probably more humane than using other forms. I would avoid poison. This is horrible, very unhumane and not always as effective as you'd think.